Domain Registration: Keep It Separate From Your Web Host Service

Some words of wisdom regarding domain name registration and web hosting.

Keep your domain registration company separate from your web hosting company.

Here's the deal: Let's say you (or "the son of a friend") got both your web host account and your domain registration through the same company (let's call it "XYZ Company"). Let's say you did this because XYZ Company offered you a "free domain for life" or some other tantalizing deal. Later, you decide to move your web site to a better web host service. So you close your web host account at XYZ Company. But you don't realize - when you close your web host account at XYZ, you also lose access to your domain, and you can't get domain control back unless you re-open your web host account. Gotcha! "Free" has suddenly ended up costing you a lot. So keep your domain registration company separate from your web hosting company and you'll always be in control.

To be fair, there are many decent web host companies out there that don't behave this way -- if you have a web host account + domain registration through a good company and you choose to close the web host account, you will still have access to your domain. However, the scenario I described above is real -- I've seen it first-hand, more than once -- and I've found it to be especially prevalent with Australian companies, including Hostway.com and HostOnce.com.

Domain Registration: Register It Yourself

Some more words of wisdom regarding domain name registration and web hosting.

Register your domain yourself. Whether you hire a web designer to build your web site for you or not - register your domain yourself.

Here's the deal: To a domain registration company, the person who registers your domain is automatically the owner of the domain, whether you paid that person or not. So if you hire "the son of a friend" to do your web site and he registers your domain for you, he is the legal owner - not you. His name, address, phone, email, credit card and mother's maiden name will be used to identify the account owner - not yours. So when "the son of a friend" gets a real job and suddenly can never be reached anymore, you call the domain registration company and tell them "it's my domain - I paid the son of a friend to register it - now give me access." They will say to you "OK, we'll give you access if you can provide the following:
(a) the account login id and password and/or
(b) the last 4 digits of the credit card used to open the account and/or
(c) the mother's maiden name of the person who opened the account."
Of course, this information belongs to "the son of a friend," not you, so now you're stuck.

You get the picture. So if you can't get "the son of a friend" to respond, your only two options will be to start legal proceedings or to give up and register a different domain - both of these options stink. (This really does happen, folks - you wouldn't believe how many clients were stuck in this situation before they came to Blacks Design.)

So register your domain yourself. Carefully record
(a) the company name/web site used to do the registration,
(b) the login id you chose, and
(c) the password you chose.
When you have all this information, then you can go ahead and give your web designer access to the domain registration account, if necessary, so she can get your site up and running (or you can modify the DNS yourself - but that's another topic).